The DXP Catalyst Update - May 14, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s DXP Catalyst Update

When I first planned to launch this newsletter back in November 2024, I drafted an initial edition covering several topics, including early developments surrounding WordPress governance and leadership tensions. Although I decided to hold off on launching the newsletter until the first week of January, I had always intended to revisit this topic as the situation continued to evolve.

In mid-January, during the CMS Experts Kickoff event in St. Pete, FL, I caught up with Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite, who mentioned his recent involvement in these events going back to late 2024. We recently had the chance to sit down for a more in-depth conversation about what has been happening behind the scenes and why it matters for the broader ecosystem.

This issue is Part One of a two-part series unpacking the situation and what it signals for the future of WordPress and open-source governance more broadly.

OPEN WEB IN FOCUS
WordPress at a Crossroads

Leadership, Lawsuits, and the Fight for the Open Web

Over the past two decades, WordPress has grown from a grassroots blogging tool into the most widely used content management system in the world, powering over 40% of all websites. But now, the project is now facing a serious governance crisis that’s raising questions about its long-term stability.

At the center of the controversy is Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic - the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and other commercial services built atop the WordPress platform. While WordPress is nominally governed by the WordPress Foundation, Mullenweg personally retains administrative control over core infrastructure like WordPress.org and the plugin repository, a dynamic that’s long been accepted, but rarely challenged so openly.

That changed in late 2024, when Mullenweg launched a highly public attack on WP Engine, one of the largest WordPress-focused hosting providers. In the months since, his actions have triggered a broader backlash, including lawsuits, plugin takeovers, bans from the community, and renewed debate over governance and control. Key figures like Karim Marucchi and Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO and a former WordPress core lead, have emerged as public voices urging reform.

A Note on Perspective

For transparency, I want to acknowledge my own connections within the WordPress ecosystem as I approach this topic. While I aim to take a neutral stance, I do have relationships with individuals at WP Engine and with Karim, whose views differ from those of Matt Mullenweg in this situation.

I first began working with WordPress in 2014, including working on client projects hosted on both WP Engine and Automattic platforms. After a few years away from the platform, I re-engaged in 2018 while serving as Head of Technology at a New York-based agency, where I established a formal partnership with WP Engine. That relationship has continued through the consulting business I now run, which offers WordPress solutions for small businesses, alongside platform/vendor advisory services and architecture design work for enterprise organizations.

I’ve known people at WP Engine, both past and present. Separately, I met and connected with Karim through a mutual contact shortly after launching my business. Since then, we’ve collaborated on content and are both members of the CMS Experts user group.

I’m sharing this not because I represent any one side, but because context matters. I know how important WordPress is to businesses, agencies, and developers, and I care about the direction it’s headed.

Timeline of Key Events

September 2024: Public Accusations

• Sept 20: Matt Mullenweg publishes a public post calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress” and encourages a community-wide boycott. He accuses the company of misusing the “WP” prefix and under-contributing to the open-source project.

• Sept 23: WP Engine issues a cease-and-desist letter, alleging defamation and extortion over proposed licensing demands tied to the “WP” trademark.

• Sept 25: Automattic responds with its own legal letter and blocks WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org infrastructure, including plugin and theme repositories.

October 2024: Escalation

• Early Oct: Mullenweg unilaterally takes over the slug for Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), replacing the plugin’s listing on WordPress.org with a forked version. This move triggered alarm across the community, especially among enterprise organizations. I’ll explore this further in the next section.

• Oct 2: WP Engine files a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, alleging extortion, abuse of power, and business interference.

• Oct 7: Automattic offers a severance package to any employee uncomfortable with the company’s position. Roughly 8.4% of the workforce accepts.

• Oct 10: Users who logged onto the WordPress.org home page were surprised to see two new additions:

  • There was a new “WP Engine has filed a massive lawsuit” section under the password field linking to WP Engine’s X post.

  • A mandatory check box. You could access the account only if you confirmed: “I am note affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially for otherwise.”

December 2024: Judicial Intervention and Public Fallout

• Dec 10: A preliminary injunction orders Automattic to restore WP Engine’s access.

• Mid-Dec: In a controversial move, Mullenweg adds a requirement for users to confirm they “like pineapple on pizza” before downloading WordPress, a widely criticized protest.

• Dec 20: Mullenweg announced a holiday break for WordPress.org, affecting several services.

• Dec 21: In a coordinated effort, Joost and Karim published blog posts with Joost calling for shared governance and Karim calling for software supply chain reform. Prior attempts to engage Mullenweg privately, including after the State of the Word in Tokyo, had been unsuccessful. Their posts did not advocate for a fork but instead called for greater transparency and accountability in WordPress leadership.

January 2025: Breaking Point

• Jan 9: The WordPress Sustainability Team is disbanded after its lead resigns in protest.

• Jan 10: Automattic announces it is scaling back its open-source contributions from ~4,000 hours per week to just 45, citing legal stress and disproportionate burden.

• Jan 11: Matt Mullenweg writes Joost/Karim Fork and announces he is banning Karim and Joost from WordPress.org, the community Slack, and from attending any community events such as WordPress Europe.

April 2025: Layoffs and Fallout Continue

• Early-Apr: Automattic announces layoffs affecting over 16% of its workforce. While no direct link has been made to the prior conflict with WP Engine or recent community tensions, the timing has raised eyebrows across the ecosystem. Coming on the heels of reduced open-source contribution hours and internal departures earlier in the year, the move has reinforced perceptions of internal strain and uncertainty about Automattic’s direction moving forward.

• Apr 21: The day before Karim will speak at PressConf, he and Joost, as well as 30 other people banned, are readmitted to .org, Slack, and WordCamps.

A Call for Reform: Karim and Joost’s Involvement

While many in the WordPress ecosystem were unsettled by the public fallout between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, few spoke out, and even fewer were in a position to. Two exceptions were Karim and Joost, both of whom chose to go public just before the holidays with coordinated posts calling for meaningful change.

Their response wasn’t reactive. It reflected a long-standing commitment to the project and a desire to see its governance evolve responsibly. Karim has been active in the WordPress space for over 15 years, working closely with early contributor Alex King and helping define the enterprise adoption path for major media organizations. Though Crowd Favorite stepped away from the WordPress VIP program in 2013, Karim continued advocating for more structured, enterprise-friendly contribution models, including proposals that would allow professional teams to work in defined sprints on targeted improvements to WordPress core. He remained engaged with project leadership, despite often being met with resistance.

That changed after the ACF plugin takeover in October. Legal teams from multiple Fortune 50 companies, all clients of Karim’s firm, reached out to him directly. Their concerns focused not on marketing or IT, but on legal and compliance risks related to what they perceived as instability in the WordPress ecosystem. The concern: if WordPress plugins could be unilaterally altered by a single administrator, the platform posed a governance and liability risk to enterprise digital supply chains. For companies with global infrastructure and compliance obligations, that crossed a line.

Joost viewed the situation through a different lens. While Karim focused on enterprise trust and the stability of the digital supply chain, Joost was more concerned with the overall health of the project. His focus centered on how decisions were being made and what that meant for the long-term sustainability of the WordPress ecosystem.

Both he and Karim attempted to engage Mullenweg privately, including outreach before and after the State of the Word in Tokyo, but their efforts were unsuccessful. On the Thursday before Christmas, they published their respective posts.

Neither called for a fork. Neither asked for Mullenweg to step down. What they called for was dialogue, transparency, and shared governance, a signal to others in the ecosystem that it was possible to speak up.

Mullenweg’s response was swift. In a sarcastically titled blog post (“JK Press”), he implied that Karim and Joost were attempting to fork the project, and shortly after, they were effectively exiled. Their access to WordPress.org was revoked. They were removed from the contributor Slack. Their WordCamp Europe tickets were refunded.

Their exclusion sent a message and it wasn’t lost on others.

The real issue here isn’t just about plugin slugs or personal disputes. It’s about the future governance of one of the internet’s most important platforms. The concern is not that WordPress has a leader. It’s that there are no mechanisms to question or balance that leadership when it impacts the ecosystem at scale.

This debate is far from over. The questions raised by Karim and Joost are likely just the beginning.

Why This Matters

The situation is about the health and future of a platform that millions of people and thousands of businesses rely on every day.

As Karim told me:

That chilling effect is being felt across the ecosystem. Developers, agency owners, and enterprise partners are watching closely, afraid to speak out, but quietly weighing their options. Some are beginning to explore alternatives.

WordPress is too big, too important, and too embedded in the fabric of the web to disappear. But if its leadership continues to alienate collaborators and control access unilaterally, the ecosystem around it will fracture.

Conclusion: What Comes Next

The story is still unfolding. As of now, WordPress 6.8 is set to be the last release of the year, a direct consequence of declining contributor participation and community disengagement. Layoffs at Automattic, plugin governance disputes, and increasing enterprise unease point to an ecosystem under serious strain.

With WordCamp Europe approaching in June, many expect another flashpoint.

Anyone concerned about the future of WordPress, both as a software platform and as a global community, should be paying attention to how this situation develops. This is more than a disagreement within an open-source project; it is becoming a clear example of the risks that emerge when centralized control conflicts with a distributed ecosystem.

I will continue to share updates as I speak with key figures in the community. Whether you are a user, contributor, agency partner, or client, the governance of WordPress remains an issue with broad and lasting implications.

Looking Ahead: Part Two

In the next installment of this series, I’ll take a closer look at how the ecosystem reached this point and what history reveals about similar moments in other open-source communities. I’ll also explore alternative governance models that could offer a more sustainable path forward for WordPress and the broader open-source movement.

Look for it in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.